


A Certain Kind of Trouble

by Sholio



Category: Daredevil (TV), Iron Fist (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Canon, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-09 20:49:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16456976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Danny decides that his friends need to meet each other, because his friends are awesome and they all should be friends with each other. Except only some of them know Matt is Daredevil.





	A Certain Kind of Trouble

**Author's Note:**

> For the following adorable prompt on Tumblr: _Post Daredevil S3. Danny drags Ward with him (because his brother should meet his friends?) when he finally pays Matt a visit for the first time since Midland Circle, at his new office the first chance he got when he's back in NY. (Bonus Karen and Foggy are there too.) Maybe some tiptoeing too because everyone's (except Ward) not sure who knows what about Matt's secret identity?? Maybe..??_
> 
> Takes place post-IF2 and DD3.

"So what do these friends of yours do, again?"

"They're lawyers," Danny said. "But nice lawyers. Like Jeri."

Ward barked a laugh. "Only you would describe Jeri Hogarth as 'nice'."

"She is, though! And she's running her own law firm now too. We should have lunch with her one of these days."

"Based on how she looked at me the last time I saw her, she'd probably try to poison my drink."

"I'll vouch for you," Danny said cheerfully.

"And I'll keep a close eye on my drink. Just in case."

Danny glanced at him with a grin. Ever since they'd gotten back to New York, Ward had had two different modes, what Danny could only think of as "on duty" and "off duty." On-duty Ward was, effectively, normal Ward, or at least Ward as he had been when Danny first met him, in a suit and tie with his hair slicked back.

Right now he was off duty: leather jacket and dark T-shirt, hair flopping down -- and what was even more interesting to Danny, his body language changed entirely to a loose kind of slouch, hands shoved in his pockets. He was like a completely different person than when he was at the office.

Their road trip had been a start, for Ward, on figuring out who he was without his dad in his life. Danny had the feeling it was still a work in progress, but they'd come back with Ward seeming a lot more relaxed and comfortable in his own skin. So that was good.

And he figured that Ward getting to know people outside his circle of Rand business contacts could only help with that. Besides, Danny felt that all his friends were awesome and therefore they ought to meet each other. The previous weekend he'd had lunch with Luke and Ward, and to his immense relief, despite having absolutely nothing in common, they'd actually gotten along -- mostly by poking fun at Danny and swapping stories about him, but he didn't mind at all. The important thing was, his friends liked each other. And he couldn't _wait_ to see Matt. Who was _alive_. He still couldn't get over that.

"Oh," he said, catching Ward's shoulder, "no, stop, we're here."

Ward looked up skeptically at the sign. "Your lawyers operate their firm out of a butcher shop?"

" _Above_ a butcher shop." Danny pushed the button beside the side door and waited to be buzzed in. "They're just starting out."

The side door clicked and he opened it onto a steep flight of stairs. A sheet of printer paper, taped to the wall, had an arrow pointing upstairs and read NELSON, MURDOCK & PAGE. Someone had crossed out "Page" and handwritten it in front.

"They're very good lawyers," Danny said, feeling a bit defensive at the look Ward was giving this.

"If they're making a living working out of here, they have to be. So how did you meet, anyway?" Ward asked as they started up the stairs.

"Oh, I helped Matt out on a ... thing."

"A thing."

"A case. On a case. Like a ... lawyer case. That I was helping with."

The thought was only now occurring to him that introducing Ward and Matt produced certain ... logistical problems. Especially since he'd talked to Ward quite a lot about working with Daredevil and the reasons behind his vigilante activities before he'd passed the torch to Colleen, back when he still thought Matt was dead. Oops. He hadn't at any point let slip that Matt _was_ Daredevil, had he? He didn't think so. He was pretty sure not.

"Earth to Danny?" Ward said from a few steps higher up.

"Uh, yeah, coming," he said, bounding up the stairs to catch up.

"Is that Danny?" a female voice called down the stairs. Someone popped into view -- swinging blonde hair, yes, must be Karen. He'd only actually met her once, but she smiled at the sight of him. "Danny! And you're Danny's -- brother, right?" She put out a hand. "Hi, I'm Karen."

"Ward," he said, shaking her hand.

"And you remember me, right?" Karen asked Danny.

"Of course I do." He gave her a quick hug, which she didn't seem to be expecting. "I'm so happy for you guys. For _everything._ Is Foggy here too?"

Foggy was here, he found out when he stuck his head into the office and Foggy waved at him from the corner. And -- yeah -- there was Matt.

He hadn't expected the sight of Matt to gut-punch him as hard as it did. Matt, alive and okay and ... better than okay, actually, because spending all this time around Ward had given him a fairly well-honed ability to tell the difference between someone who was _really_ okay and someone who was just pretending, and Matt when Danny had first met him had definitely been in the "just pretending" category, but now he was leaning back in his chair with papers and audiotapes and computer CDs scattered all over the desk in front of him, smiling at Danny and looking really _happy_ for the first time since Danny had met him.

\-- so Danny lunged over and hugged him, like you do. 

"Ack?" Matt said, which was approximately the usual reaction that people had to Danny hugging them. 

"You're alive," he told Matt, his voice cracking a little. "You're alive."

Matt hesitantly patted him on the back.

"Wait, you thought he was dead?" Ward said from the doorway, which reminded Danny, oh right, _secret identity,_ dammit. He hadn't actually said "Daredevil" at any point, had he? No? Good. Now he just needed to get through the entire conversation without doing it.

"It was a misunderstanding," Foggy said in a somewhat weighted tone. "We have them a lot, with Matt. That sort of misunderstanding."

"Anyway," Danny said quickly before things could get any more awkward, "this is my brother Ward."

Introductions went around, and Danny sat on the edge of Matt's desk while Ward dropped into a chair across from Foggy. There wasn't much room in here; with three desks and some filing cabinets crammed in, there was just enough room for a chair or two for clients. A small window gave them a view down onto the street outside.

"So we were thinking we'd order in, if that's okay," Karen said. "We're a little buried, and _someone_ \--" looking at Matt here "-- didn't put your lunch date on the office calendar."

Matt held up his hands. "I'm still getting used to having an office calendar."

"That's because Karen is organized, unlike the rest of us," Foggy said. "Pizza? Italian? Vietnamese? There's a ton of good takeout within a couple blocks of here. And I can just walk downstairs and get fantastic sandwiches from my folks' deli counter for cheap."

"Sandwiches sounds good, I think?" Danny glanced towards Ward, who shrugged.

"Rock paper scissors for who takes the order," Karen said, and thrust out her fist toward Foggy.

Foggy lost ("She always wins, I don't know how she does that") and passed around a legal pad for everyone to scribble down their sandwich orders.

"So what've you been up to?" Matt asked Danny. "I hear you were out of town for awhile."

"Yeah," Danny said, "Iron Fist stuff." This prompted anxious looks between Foggy and Karen. "Oh, don't worry, it's not a secret. I don't mind talking about it."

"He's not kidding about that," Ward put in. "Hi, I'm Danny Rand, and I'm the Immortal Iron Fist. Want to hear about how I punched a dragon in the heart?"

Foggy and Karen's laughs were slightly nervous, and both of them looked at Matt, which made Danny decide that it was probably best to get off the topic of secret identities, and also it was nice that someone else had a worse poker face than he did. Unfortunately there was no way he could ask Matt what he really wanted to ask, which was basically _how come you're not dead, most people tend to be dead after a building falls on them_ , not with Ward there.

"So you guys are running your own law firm now," he said, as Foggy vanished down the stairs with their sandwich order. "What's that like?"

Matt seemed as relieved as Danny was to veer onto safer topics, and for awhile they talked about some of the odder clients that Nelson & Murdock (& Page) had dealt with over their slightly uneven history, leaving out the entire issue of why and how they'd broken up and gotten back together in the first place.

Foggy came back with sandwiches in the middle of a story about a client who had paid them in chickens. Danny reciprocated by telling them about how he and Ward had hidden out from Orson Randall's thugs in a chicken coop in Malaysia, and then swung into a couple of anecdotes about some of the wilder stuff that had happened to him while he was Daredeviling around Chinatown. This got him some looks from Ward, who in retrospect Danny realized had never heard some of this stuff.

"I don't know if it's rude to ask," Karen said, "but, uh, your glowing fist -- is it weird to ask if we could see it?"

"I'd show it to you if I could," Danny said. "It doesn't glow anymore. Colleen has it now. You met Colleen when the whole Midland Circle thing happened, right?"

"Oh, yeah, Colleen's great!" Foggy said. "She's fantastic. We've worked together recently on a couple of ..." He visibly threw a switch on the mental train-tracks and rerouted whatever he was going to say. "-- cases. Lawyer cases. Because we're lawyers."

Ward gave a sudden intake of breath and got a look like everything had suddenly started making sense. "Oh, okay. One of you three is Daredevil, aren't you?"

There was an incredibly awkward silence, and then Matt said, " _Danny."_

"I didn't tell him!" Danny protested, waving his hands at Ward. "He figured it out! Just now! You heard him!"

"Shit." Ward glanced quickly around the room. "Some of you didn't know."

"No, we know," Foggy said. "We all know."

" _You're_ not supposed to," Karen added, and she shot a glare at Danny, who wilted.

"It's not his fault," Matt said, to Foggy and Karen's obvious surprise. "Look, I know I dropped a lot on you, Danny, with ... what I asked you to do. I'm glad you told your friends and let them help you." His glance in the general direction of Foggy and Karen was freighted with unspoken emotion. "It took me a long time to learn to do that. _That_ being said --"

"-- It's a secret," Danny said quickly. "I know. I'm sorry. You can't talk about it, Ward. Not to anybody except me and Colleen."

"Big secret, got it." Ward leveled a glance at Matt. "So it's you? You're not the one I would've pegged for it. I actually thought it was her." He nodded to Karen.

"So you're saying we should've kept our mouths shut and kept you guessing," Foggy said ruefully.

"Seriously, how do you people keep any secrets at all."

 

*

 

But getting it out into the open actually cleared the air. The mood was noticeably lighter for the rest of their visit, though Danny still decided to save for later any heavy conversations about Matt's survival and all the many questions he had related to that.

Karen had to go out to run some errands, so she offered to walk them back to Ward's car. She and Ward left ahead of Danny, who hung back when Matt beckoned to him.

"You never even thought twice about telling your friends, did you?" Matt asked quietly. He didn't look at Foggy, who suddenly got very interested in the paperwork on his desk. "About you being the Iron Fist, I mean."

"Of course not," Danny said. "They're my friends. I mean, uh --" He thought about stuffing a fist into his mouth. "I mean, I get why you didn't. Really. It _does_ make sense. It's just that I never in a million years would've been able to not tell them, so there was no point in trying."

Foggy made a choking sound from the corner, but when Danny glanced around, he had a perfectly straight face. Matt looked amused.

"I'm sorry about the thing with Ward," Danny added. "I did talk to him about what I was doing, when I was doing it, but -- I mean, I never told him about you, though. I wouldn't."

"I know you wouldn't," Matt said, abruptly serious. "I wouldn't have trusted you if I thought you would. It's just ... inevitable, I guess. I knew the cat was out of the bag as soon as Foggy found out. It's what happens when you decide to start working with other people instead of working alone." He ducked his head; his ears had turned slightly pink, and Foggy was now _very_ ostentatiously not looking at them. "It's worth it. So. It took me a long while to learn that. I'm glad you didn't have to. How is your brother at keeping secrets, by the way?"

"He's great at it," Danny promised. "Really great. He won't tell." He took a breath. "So ... you're not mad at me for leaving town? I kinda wondered. If you would be."

Matt held his forefinger and thumb about an inch apart -- and then broke into a smile, a quick flash of teeth. "You did what I did. You left the city in good hands. If I had it to do over again ... I like to think I'd do some things differently, but that, I wouldn't change."

"Thanks." It shouldn't have felt like such a relief -- but it did, like the sun coming up. He asked hopefully, "We can ... get together again sometime?"

"Yeah," Matt said. "Yeah, let's do that."

"We can even have a team-up for old time's sake," Danny said, and Matt's shy, sunny smile flashed again.

"Hey, does your brother have any useful superpowers we should know about?" Foggy asked from across the room. Danny got the impression that, while Matt might be surprisingly okay with it, Foggy still wasn't quite over a certain amount of protective defensiveness over Ward blurting out Matt's secret identity.

And ... the mind boggled at the idea of Ward with superpowers. "Just weapons-grade sarcasm, mostly."

Foggy slowly grinned, and the last of the tension melted. "He should meet Jessica."

"I think you mean he should _never_ meet Jessica," Matt said. He hesitated and then reached out and gripped Danny's arm briefly, sincere though awkward. "Hey, now that you're back in town ... if you need help? Call us."

"And refer all your friends who need legal help to us," Foggy piped up from the corner.

Danny just nodded, grinning too hard to really say anything, and ducked out the door before he could be too tempted to hug Matt again. (He'd save that for the next time.)

As he left, he heard Foggy say, "So how does it feel to be a mentor?" He missed exactly what Matt's response was; he just got the flustered tone of it.

He went down the stairs two at a time, feeling light. Matt was alive and Danny had a _team_ (sort of) and friends (definitely) and a family and life was ... life was _good._

**Author's Note:**

> I wouldn't normally feel like I needed to say this, but since this story deals with some potentially fandom-touchy topics (e.g. Matt's "death", Matt's secret identity, Matt asking Danny to watch the city for him), and is tagged outside my usual Iron Fist tags ... please no character/canon bashing in comments? THEY ARE ALL LOVELY PEOPLE AND THEY ALL DESERVE LOVE. <3


End file.
